Esse Quam Videri

On your view, how is this possible? What enables these people to get any epistemic purchase on distal objects such that their claims about such object...

No worries.

I don't deny any of this.

No, but it's hard to understand how knowledge of atoms can get off the ground unless perception can underwrite the correctness of the practices throug...

Basically (5) is just another way of saying that if perception were not capable of providing knowledge of distal objects and their properties then the...

We've been around the block a few times now in this discussion, so I'd like to switch gears for a moment. You've repeatedly appealed to science as pro...

Fair enough—if the only question you’re trying to answer is “what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience?”, then I agree that you ...

I think this is a fair pushback, and I agree that my quick framing risks sounding like a Cartesian “mind vs world” split. I’m sympathetic to the Merle...

Yes, I agree it’s probably the underlying axis. For my part I would tend to side more with . I wouldn't want to deny creation, enaction, or becoming, ...

While I can't speak for @"J", I can say that it hasn't been my intention to collapse everything into one level. I take it that the distinction between...

Nicely put. I agree there’s an additional pressure point here: intelligibility isn’t a free-floating property—it’s conceptually bound up with the poss...

I completely agree that when we turn our attention to the phenomenal quality of the experience, the distal-object-qua-causal-source is bracketed to th...

Yes, I think this gets exactly to the heart of the matter, and it helps show why the game analogy is doing double duty in a way that may ultimately mi...

Some further thoughts for your consideration: I think this is a helpful way of isolating the issue, and you’re right that premise (4) is doing all the...

—That’s a nice way of putting pressure on the issue, and I think it helps clarify what’s at stake. From within a game, “better” is defined by the rule...

I think this rests on an overly narrow notion of object-directedness. Bracketing interest in a distal cause does not amount to the absence of an objec...

I don't deny that the information carried by the light remains continuous between the two intervals. I’m claiming that perceptual fulfillment is not e...

Yes, and I have likewise admitted several times that there are different senses of "direct" in play. My concern is not to deny that there are multiple...

You’re right to push on the consciousness point—I didn’t mean to suggest that evolutionary accounts of cognition or consciousness are settled. What I ...

I wasn't thinking primarily of Schelling. The position I'm gesturing at is a bit of an eclectic synthesis across a number of thinkers and traditions, ...

I think that the deepest difficulty for strict naturalism is not whether evolution can produce reliable cognition—it clearly can—but whether it can ac...

This doesn't sound quite right to me. While the distal causal history of the light may be the same across both intervals, the fulfillment conditions o...

You are free to stipulate indirect realism in this purely negative way if you wish, but it’s unreasonable to expect others to adopt this stipulation g...

I think we agree that indirect realism means that (a) is false and that (b) and (c) are true. This is why I don't consider myself an indirect realist;...

You’re right that in meditation or music one can lose awareness of the object and focus entirely on phenomenology. I don’t dispute that phenomenologic...

I don’t think I’ve elevated anything here. I’ve simply tried to describe the phenomenology of the event as accurately as I can. Furthermore, I don’t d...

Yes, and if both sides accept that usage, then both sides are already confused in the same way. Yes—I mean something else, because the traditional usa...

That doesn't sound right to me. I don't deny that the chiming can become the focus of reflective attention in its own right; I deny only that it is th...

— We’re mostly on the same page here. I think the only remaining divergence concerns whether meta-reflection counts as part of the game of rational in...

This is the claim I don’t accept. Phenomenal continuity does not entail the ontological continuity of the perceptual object. Since I deny that percept...

For what it's worth, I would reject this premise as stated. What is directly perceived at one moment need not be numerically identical to what is perc...

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the r...

While I agree that IR is not incoherent in the sense of entailing a contradiction, I personally wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s equally correct...

Nicely stated. I think this answers the question quite well. I see what you are getting at, but I'm inclined to characterize "framework adoption" as a...

Thank you for these clarifying remarks. I have one additional follow-up question: in your account, is objective justification sufficient for knowledge...

I've finished reading your paper and I think it is an excellent piece of philosophy. It's careful, insightful, and clarifies much confusion surroundin...

That's a fair worry. Like you I would resist any attempt to blur this distinction, but I would equally resist any attempt to detach truth from reality...

Still missing the point, as ever. Each and every one of those positions carries mutually incompatible metaphysical and normative presuppositions that ...

I basically agree with 's reply here. There is a minimal metaphysical commitment that I would say is unavoidable; namely, that there is something that...

Ha. Indeed. I try to see disagreement as an opportunity to learn something new or refine what I already know, hence my curiosity.

I agree with you, though many would disagree. I was curious where you would fall on the question. Sounds like we broadly agree on these issues.

I'd say the same — in reverse — for the same reason. :smile: This is false. Many secular viewpoints explicitly claim metaphysical and normative primac...

This is a strong reply, and I agree with much of it, but I don't think it gets to the heart of @"J"'s concern. My interpretation is that J is not ques...

This deflates the traditional claims of indirect realism to the point of triviality. Nothing you've said here is incompatible with a direct realism th...

The thing that makes this discussion so difficult is that both parties accept the same underlying causal story, but interpret it in different ways. Co...

I do think this is a dis-analogy, but I agree that someone can press it to its logical conclusion if they’re willing to accept the consequences. My po...

I agree that there may be unconscious cue-integration or subpersonal inference involved in perceiving someone as angry. But that doesn’t establish ont...

A TV is not a mode of presentation in the sense I mean; it’s a mediating object. It has identity conditions, can be attended to independently of what ...

Yes, I think it is. Treating phenomenal experience as a mode of access invalidates the priority claim because it disqualifies it from playing the inte...

Once “mental phenomena” in (2) are understood thinly—as features of experience rather than objects in their own right—then (2) becomes perfectly compa...